Books to find room for

We have been reading the TPBs at our house lately, some of which I'll probably talk about eventually, some of which I won't. I've been trying to figure out all that Infinite Crisis stuff. So far the best I've seen has been Identity Crisis and Villains United (surprising since it features a cast made up almost entirely of characters I've never heard of).

So the eleven-year-old and I went to our local B. Dalton the other day so I could get OMAC Project, and she chose one of the Teen Titans TPBs, and of course I read it because it's a comic book and it's in my house. She wants more, which will make shopping for her upcoming birthday much easier. (The one she chose is the 4th in the series.) For those of you currently weighing the pros and cons of having kids, here's one for the pro side: if you're lucky they can be an excuse to buy more comics!

She is still convinced that she doesn't choose her favorites based on age, and while I think this may be true of individual characters (she loves Ms. Marvel), when she chooses books she often goes for the teen titles (Teen Titans, New X-Men). I'm not really sure what the difference is, and I don't think comic writers now are any better at writing teenagers than they were when I was a kid--but I suspect that it's more often the pre-teens that like the teen heroes, anyway. (Kind of like how readers of Seventeen magazine are generally younger than that--actual seventeen-year-olds who are interested in that stuff generally go after the adult magazines like Glamour. Or did when I was younger. Which I will grant was some time ago.) She does seem to lose interest when the characters take on specific roles, particularly when they are parents, but doesn't seem to see much difference between a teen character and a young adult character.

(Regarding teen heroes, I read Legion of Superheroes as a kid, but honestly it was pretty rare that they were presented as teenagers--they didn't look particularly young--and of course eventually they aged them and they were in fact adults. For a while.)

I'm still not sure of the best way to store these--keeping them in longboxes (although these days we get shortboxes, easier for young ones to carry around) seems kind of silly, so I will probably try to dig some shelf space out somewhere. We have many bookshelves but they are pretty much all full.